What Do You Do When Amazon Goes Down?

You might have noticed around noon on Tuesday (2/28/17) that much of the web went dark. An outage on Amazon’s “S3” system wreaked havoc on big-name services including Apple, Spotify, Slack, and Amazon itself, plus thousands of others like your local TV station. They all went dark.

The outage bit hard into 54 of the top 100 internet retailers. Website page-load times increased by triple digits. S&P 500 companies lost $150 million.

But do you know who uses Amazon and was not adversely affected? Netflix is one example – they did their homework on redundancy, designing around the occasional but potentially massive real-world trouble. Vanguard Software is another example (and yes, we use the S3 location that went down).

How did we come out unscathed? The straight answer is that we’ve invested a lot of time and money in our infrastructure. Our cloud platform for business forecasting and planning operates across an expanding global network of data centers. Any change that any user of Vanguard Software makes in the system is replicated worldwide in seconds. Users and collaborators across globally distributed environments can see these changes in real-time, all of the time.

The system works by continually optimizing usage of available network resources and replicating changes across multiple data centers. That eliminates the risk of any single-point failure while ensuring maximum speed, fail-safe performance, and a consistently solid customer experience.

In fact, our fully redundant mesh network cuts latency by up to 90 percent compared to most SaaS systems. With this approach, our effective availability is as close to 100 percent as is technically possible! It cannot be taken down by an outage such as the one on Tuesday. In fact, from the moment the AWS data-center went offline, all of Vanguard’s software-as-a-service customers continued working without out disruption and without any loss of data or productivity.

Okay I’m bragging a bit. My point is, Vanguard Software takes every measure to deliver the utmost performance and reliability to our clients. We take our customers’ data availability, integrity, and confidentiality seriously. And our customers are benefiting from first class engineering. Here’s proof: no service interruption during one of the web’s largest outages. That’s solid. Let’s give a big-up to Netflix too!